From nonsense to openness : Wittgenstein on moral sense

Peer reviewe

Hiding From Love : The Repressed Insight in Freud’s Account of Morality

Freud’s account of morality is distinctive, and right, in focusing on unconscious, emotionalized conflict, and specifically on the repression of love as the centre of moral life. However, Freud misunderstands love in drive terms and confuses conscience with the superego. Conscience is actually an immediate moral understanding, an interpersonal openness that the moral normativity of collectivity (values, ideals, etc.) represses. Thus, conscience is the repressed unconscious of the superego, and ‘morality’ not one thing, but a living contradiction. This chapter details how bad conscience differs from superego guilt, how destructive emotions (e.g. jealousy) are in themselves moralized repressions of love, and how Freud’s officially amoral, drive-based accounts of the Oedipus complex and the installation of the superego break down, but can be understood if reconceptualized in the terms proposed here. The chapter elucidates the concrete sense in which openness and love can be conceived as the very heart of moral understanding.Freud’s account of morality is distinctive, and right, in focusing on unconscious, emotionalized conflict, and specifically on the repression of love as the centre of moral life. However, Freud misunderstands love in drive terms and confuses conscience with the superego. Conscience is actually an immediate moral understanding, an interpersonal openness that the moral normativity of collectivity (values, ideals, etc.) represses. Thus, conscience is the repressed unconscious of the superego, and ‘morality’ not one thing,but a living contradiction. This chapter details how bad conscience differs from superegoguilt, how destructive emotions (e.g. jealousy) are in themselves moralized repressions of love, and how Freud’s officially amoral, drive-based accounts of the Oedipus complex and the installation of the superego break down, but can be understood if reconceptualized in the terms proposed here. The chapter elucidates the concrete sense in which openness and love can be conceived as the very heart of moral understanding.Peer reviewe

Love and Capital

Non peer reviewe

The fear of openness : an essay on friendship and the roots of morality

Det förefaller självklart att begrepp som lojalitet, respekt, rättigheter eller altruism beskriver något entydigt gott. Men tänk om det i själva verket är så att de aktualiseras bara där vi avvisat godheten? Tänk om vår moral och hela vårt liv genomsyras av en djup förvirring, av en ovilja att se vad som egentligen pågår mellan oss? I min avhandling ställer jag de här obekväma frågorna. Utgångspunkten är en diskussion om vänskap, som jag beskriver som en förbehållslös, helhjärtad öppenhet mellan människor. Denna öppenhet – som lika väl kan kallas godhet eller kärlek – är det svåraste som finns. Samtidigt finns öppenheten alltid där mellan oss, om så bara som en anad möjlighet som skrämmer oss, som vi sluter oss för och inte vill veta av. Vi lever i en ständig spänning mellan öppenhet och avvisande, och denna spänning yttrar sig i allt vi gör, känner och tänker. Det är vad jag vill visa. Bland de filosofer jag diskuterar kan nämnas Aristoteles, Kant, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche och Emmanuel Levinas

Making Enemies : Reactive Dynamics of Discursive Polarization

empirical material from discourses of and on right-wing nationalism. We approach polarization as a historically evolving process of identity-construction, focusing on the back-and-forth movement of action and reaction between the various actors involved. We show how, through scapegoating, denigration, etc., the parties tend to alienate each other, actively making their enemies. In specifically discursive terms, we analyse ways in which discourse in polarized settings tends to become deadlocked, mutually hostile and in other ways limited and distorted in its communicative function, sketching various part-logics of polarization, including a logic of ‘doubles’, a logic of ‘shibboleths and taboos’, and of ‘pollution and paranoid extension’.Peer reviewe